Study on Postcard-Only Policies from the Prison Policy Initiative

“Over the past five years, dozens of local jails across the country have followed a harmful new policy trend: mandating that all personal written correspondence to or from jail take place via postcard. The postcard-only trend began in 2007, when controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio instituted a ban on any incoming non-legal mail except for postcards.[1] Since then, sheriffs from jails in at least 13 states around the country—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, and Washington—have followed suit by implementing their own postcard-only restrictions on incoming and outgoing mail, radically restricting incarcerated people’s ability to communicate with the outside world. Although several jails that implemented postcard-only policies have since rescinded or relaxed their regulations in response to public pressure and litigation, dozens of postcard-only policies still stand, and more are introduced each year.”